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This tintype probably dates from the late 19th century, when this early form of photography was in its prime. Tintypes are images produced on thin sheets of metal, though it wasn't actually tin. No negatives were used, making each tintype a one-of-a-kind image.

I scanned the tiny 2- by 3-inch image at a fairly hefty 1,200 pixels per inch, allowing me to print an enlargement when the restoration was complete. Time hadn't been kind to the image; tintypes were typically low contrast, but this one also appears to have suffered a lot of wear as well as some mishandling.

Another result of the tintype process is that the picture is always a mirror image of the subject. So my first step was to open the scanned image in Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 and flip it horizontally.

To straighten the image, I chose View | Grid, and then activated Elements' Free Transform function. I rotated the image, lining up its backdrop against the grid's vertical lines. I then used the Crop tool to constrain the image to the dimensions of the backdrop.

Next, I created a Levels adjustment layer, dragging the white input level to the right edge of the histogram to increase the contrast, and then moving the gamma point to the left to brighten things up. (I ended up with an input level of 93 and a gamma point of 1.38.) This fix revealed an enormous amount of detail in the imagealong with an almost overwhelming number of nicks, scars, and scratches. The tintype looks like it was attacked with a fork. Luckily, Elements has excellent tools for cleaning up such problems, namely the Clone Stamp and the new Healing Brush. (I first tried the more automated Spot Healing Brush, but the image is so cluttered with imperfections that this brush tended to copy one scratch over another.)

The Healing Brush did the lion's share of the cleanup work, though the Clone Stamp tool was vital for fixing problems along edges within the image. It was impossible to remove all the blemishes, but eliminating the worst imperfections made a dramatic improvement. This labor-intensive touching up took several hours; using a digitizing tablet instead of a mouse no doubt helped postpone an attack of carpal tunnel syndrome.

I also performed a touch-up of a different nature; the standing figure in the image has a lazy left eye. I selected his right eye, pressed Ctrl-J to float it onto its own layer, flipped it horizontally, rotated it slightly, lightened it a bit with the Levels command, and positioned it over his left eye. Though this type of touch-up should normally be performed only with the subject's permission, that wasn't practical with this ancient image, so I took the liberty of tampering with nature. And the flexibility of Photoshop Elements' layers makes these changes eminently undoable.

The restoration of the tintype could have been considered complete at this point, but I wanted to experiment with "hand-tinting" it. I used Photoshop Elements' Desaturate command to remove the color from the image and used the Levels adjustment layer to lighten things up a bit more. I then created a new layer above the Levels adjustment layer and set its blending mode to Color. The Color blending mode layer allowed me to paint with the Brush tool on top of the image without obscuring the underlying details. Finally, I lowered the opacity of the painted layer to 40 percent to reduce the intensity of the colors.

The final imagewhile not perfectis much brighter and clearer than the original tintype, and the addition of color helps bring the subjects to life.